>> Go Back - page - >> List of Entriess
and even quadroon, children in the native quarter at Alice Springs growing up without education or any moral
control’. He expressed the hope that this would soon be remedied, ‘the first step being the establishment of a school
with a qualified teacher, who, although primarily required for the white children previously denied a State School
education, will also hold classes for the quadroons and half-castes’.
In 1914, the year Ida Standley arrived to teach the white children of Stuart, an Aboriginal woman, Topsy Smith,
came to the town following the death of a miner with whom she had been living at Arltunga. She brought with her a
number of half-caste children. Police Sergeant Robert Stott accommodated her in a tent and informed Darwin that
there was no accommodation for her children. He suggested that two township allotments near the police station
should be reserved for half-castes. The Administrator agreed to the building of an iron shed and so the Bungalow
was born. Topsy Smith was placed in charge under the supervision of Sergeant Stott. During the following year, the
building was extended to accommodate half-caste children from outlying areas. Ida Standley was invited to accept
the position of matron with an addition to her salary (150 Pounds plus keep) of 50 Pounds per annum. Topsy Smith
stayed on in a house-parent capacity for many years.
For four and a half hours each morning, Ida Standley taught non-Aboriginal children—eleven initially—in a
room at the police station. The younger Bungalow children played around the grounds until lunch, while the older
children engaged in household duties, and making and mending clothes under Topsy Smith’s supervision. After
lunch, 14 of the half-caste children attended school for one and a half hours in the same schoolroom as the whites.
At night, following a visit from the matron, who lived elsewhere, the children were left in the care of Smith. There
were periods, however, when Standley provided evening instruction to adult half-castes at the institution.
Standley herself lamented the shortness of the school day which she said coupled with the children’s background,
prevented them achieving as much as they might. Numerous early visitors to the institution, however, conditioned
to believe the worst of Aboriginal and half-caste children, were incredulous in noting the academic successes of the
students and their state of health. They were, it was generally agreed, a credit to the matron. Standley was herself
able to note, in 1915, that a boy of Aboriginal and Chinese descent, taught with the white children, was ‘head of
the school in all round work’.
The conditions under which the children lived, on the other hand, were deplored by visitors. Unfenced, and
located in the centre of the town, the three corrugated iron sheds that comprised the Bungalow were poorly equipped
for comfort and Central Australia’s extremes of temperature. Cooking and bathing facilities were inadequate.
The depressing little compound, opposite the prison door, received a good deal of attention from the town’s white
menfolk, much taken by the presence of the older girls.
Working in these conditions, Standley spent nearly 15 years labouring in the interests of her charges. Imbued,
naturally enough, with much of the paternalism of the time, she saw that it was possible to equip the children to
take their place in non-Aboriginal Australian society. To this end, and with the earnest assistance of Sergeant Stott,
tribal and camp blacks were kept clear of the Bungalow. Mothers could visit their children, but children were kept
well away from the camps.
In a report on conditions at the Bungalow in 1923, Professor Baldwin Spencer noted of the educational
attainments of the children, ‘Under the very difficult conditions the results attained seemed to me to be excellent
and to hold forth great promise as to what can be done with the half-castes under more favourable conditions of
tuition.’ Thirty-six children at that time were taught in a room that ‘was far too small’. Spencer also noted that
‘every possible care of the half-castes has been taken by the Matron and her assistant’. He went on to recommend
the establishment of a new institution—out of Stuart—at which half-castes could be trained in useful industrial
pursuits. In recommending a move, Spencer was reiterating what officials such as Stott, numerous visitors, southern
newspapers and even government ministers had been urging for years. Strenuous attacks had long been made on
the Administration for allowing the poor conditions to continue, though Standley herself appears to have been
spared all censure.
Notwithstanding expressed good intentions of government ministers responsible for the Territory, throughout
the 1920s bureaucratic red tape and Treasury intransigence forestalled any move until 1929. In that year, the
institution was moved to Jay Creek; Standley went too. She had been ill for quite some time and was due for
age-60 retirement in January 1929. However, in the absence of a suitable replacement, she was prevailed upon by
the Government Resident to move with the children to Jay Creek. The move was rushed—a consequence of the
imminent arrival of railway workers in Alice Springs, considered to be a bad omen for the older girls. At Jay Creek
the children lived in a tin shed built with materials from the dismantled Bungalow buildings while Standley’s living
quarters comprised a tent covered with a bough-shelter. In the blazing heat of summer, without an adequate water
supply, isolated in bush country and having no means of communication with Alice Springs, Standley laboured
uncomplainingly until her health broke down and an official said ‘she could no longer carry out her duties’.
At the time of her retirement, Standley was acutely aware of the poor recompense she received. Adult teachers
in Darwin were paid 300 Pounds per annum for a normal school day, took public holidays and were entitled to
one month’s annual leave. She, on the other hand, received a total, in 1927, of 307 Pounds and was unable to take
Christmas, Easter and other public holidays. Only once, however, it seems did she seek to leave her position—
in 1925 when she applied for a transfer to ‘any other position in the south’.
Shortly after her retirement at age 60 she gave an account of her work to the Country Women’s Association
in Sydney in October 1929 and in November, she went to Melbourne to receive an award—Member of the Order
of the British Empire (MBE)—for services to child welfare in Central Australia. In 1934, she applied to return to
the institution to help the matron who was working under difficulties. Her request was refused. Her son, Clarence
Standley, went back to the Territory as a miner at Tennant Creek, but died of appendicitis in Darwin in August
1937.